The moral philosopher Jonathan Glover interviewed a number of anti-social people, including psychopaths, who have committed serious crimes and live in secure hospitals in order to investigate how they think about right and wrong and what sort of conscience they have. He thinks they have a conscience, but one unlike others’. They have strong feelings [Read More...]

Contrary to first impressions, it does not seem at this point that Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and nineteen other people was directly inspired by the Tea Party movement or by Sarah Palin. What has dribbled out so far about Loughner’s ideas seems closest to anarchism in ideology and there are amateur diagnoses [Read More...]

Prominent leaders of political, social, religious, and even anti-religious organizations, movements, governments, etc. should not simply echo back what their “constituencies” already think and want to hear—otherwise they would not be leaders at all. But to a certain extent, once it becomes clear that a great many people do associate their views closely with certain [Read More...]

Greta Christina attacks what she calls “the myth of sexual spontaneity,” defined as the idea that “for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately” on the grounds that arises from and implictly reinforces negative views of sex: Our culture tends [Read More...]